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| 0871404192
| 9780871404190
| 0871404192
| 3.64
| 1,968
| 1979
| May 20, 2013
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really liked it
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Bizarre Suburban Messiah Death Fantasy, with Loads of Symbolism Depending on how open you are to very ambiguous, uncomfortable, subtly ironic, and flat Bizarre Suburban Messiah Death Fantasy, with Loads of Symbolism Depending on how open you are to very ambiguous, uncomfortable, subtly ironic, and flat-out bizarre stories, you will probably rate this very highly or give up after a few chapters. As a long-time Ballard fan, I know enough to expect all of the above, and take pleasure in the strangeness of it all. The story outline is easily described (check some book blurb), but the reading must be experienced to understand it. There is just no way to predict how any given reader will react - its a love/hate thing. Oh, and there is a load of sperm flying about, literally, metaphorically, metaphysically, so if you are faint of heart or easily offended, you've been warned! You will struggle to interpret what it all means, even after finishing it, but I guarantee you won't forget it. I might revisit again someday, it's short enough, and has plenty of psychological depths to plumb. ...more |
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May 25, 2022
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May 27, 2022
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May 25, 2022
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| B0865TSTWM
| 4.23
| 313,727
| Sep 15, 2020
| Sep 15, 2020
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it was amazing
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Charmingly Surreal and Mysterious, Short and Lyrical As everyone has said in their reviews, the less you know the better. A mysterious and magical sett Charmingly Surreal and Mysterious, Short and Lyrical As everyone has said in their reviews, the less you know the better. A mysterious and magical setting reminiscent of Borges' The Library of Babel, an innocent protagonist with no memory of the past, and subtle more sinister hints and gradual reveals of the bigger picture. Truly lyrical writing, not overly florid but still filled with spare and beautiful imagery. Ruminations on the pursuit of knowledge, snippets of philosophy, and a moving denouement as things are revealed, yet still retaining that sense of mystery and mystical indeterminacy. An excellent little book, but totally different in themes and style and story to her massive Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Finished it in two afternoon listening sessions. ...more |
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1
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Dec 28, 2021
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Dec 30, 2021
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Jan 01, 2022
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| 1910593273
| 9781910593271
| 1910593273
| 3.80
| 319
| Apr 06, 2016
| Mar 14, 2017
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it was amazing
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A fantastic visual portrait of Gauguin, inspired by his artistic style This is a visually sumptuous graphic novel depicting the life of the infamous re A fantastic visual portrait of Gauguin, inspired by his artistic style This is a visually sumptuous graphic novel depicting the life of the infamous rebel painter and champion of the "primitive" in art and rejection of tawdry Western civilization. His symbolic escape to Tahiti and haunting paintings of Tahitian women and simple island life are a direct rejection of the materialistic and soul-less world of Western civilization. It explores the spiritual struggles, megalomania, and single-minded pursuit of his art that Gauguin was eager to project to the larger world - his life was a form of protest against bourgeois thinking and formalist art, and his paintings were his tools to challenge the status quo. If you are even slightly interested in him as a person, more dramatic than life, you will be entranced by this visually-brilliant dive into his complex mental and spiritual landscape. ...more |
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Aug 09, 2021
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Aug 09, 2021
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Aug 09, 2021
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| 0307268861
| 9780307268860
| 0307268861
| 4.10
| 13,644
| Jun 01, 2008
| Sep 02, 2008
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really liked it
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The Gone-Away World: Relentlessly ironic, digressive, and clever Originally posted at Fantasy Literature The Gone-Away World (2008) is a post-apocalypti The Gone-Away World: Relentlessly ironic, digressive, and clever Originally posted at Fantasy Literature The Gone-Away World (2008) is a post-apocalyptic comedy/tragedy about our world before and after the Gone-Away Bombs have wiped up out much of humanity and the world we know. It is about Gonzo Lubitsch and his nameless best friend, who work for a special crew that is assigned to put of a fire along the Jorgmond pipeline, which produced the special material “Fox” that can eliminate the Stuff, the matter that is left over after gone-away bombs have removed the information from matter so that it no longer can form coherent form and structure. Stuff takes on the shape of the thoughts of people near it — nightmarish monsters, ill-formed creatures, and “new people.” Nightmares become real, and the world itself is a nightmare of sorts. And very soon after the story begins, we are wrenched back into Gonzo and his friend’s upbringing and bizarre early years learning kung-fu from Master Wu. The Gone-Away World is a long story that absolutely revels in its digressions and manic humor that relentlessly attacks the insanity of the military weapons mentality and the soul-destroying nature of corporations and conformity. It devotes a lot of time to ninjas and martial arts and military training, the cruel absurdity of war zones and civilian casualties, weird desert nomad tribes, and then the surreal post-apocalyptic communities of Mad Max-like survivors and predators clinging to a precarious survival. It is also about friendships and identity, as the characters fall into and out of different roles and situations, constantly shifting. Everything is maniacally sarcastic, filled with tragic irony and withering contempt for corporate rapacious greed. There are so many digressions that even the digressions have digressions. The story veers from one situation and tone to another, and then two-thirds of the way in, a shocking turn of the plot turns the entire story on its head and changes our understanding of everything that came before, and the final third of the book is truly different from what came before. The story flies through some powerful and grim examinations of war, destruction, greed, and societal collapse, and yet retains a dogged insistence on making an ironic and ultra-clever quotable comment on the whole glorious mess. It is self-indulgent and digressive and deeply morally-insistent all at the same time. The relationship of the narrator and Gonzo is a fascinating thing, and changes dramatically and suddenly mid-way through. The book could have used a much tougher editor — it’s like listening to your brilliant friend talking a mile a minute, both exhilarating and exhausting. It reminded me somewhat of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, with its larger-than-life characters, lengthy descriptions and elaborate language and humor. If you are in the mood for a completely different and bizarre literary SF satire on our world, this may be worth a try. The audiobook is expertly by Kirby Heyborne. ...more |
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2
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Mar 30, 2018
not set
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Apr 20, 2018
not set
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Feb 19, 2018
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| 1416556966
| 9781416556961
| 1416556966
| 4.12
| 76,986
| May 1971
| Apr 15, 2008
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it was amazing
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The Lathe of Heaven: An early 1970s classic of reality-altering dreams with Taoist undercurrents Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I love Ursula K The Lathe of Heaven: An early 1970s classic of reality-altering dreams with Taoist undercurrents Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I love Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels from the late 1960s and early 70s. She just couldn’t go wrong during this period. Although The Lathe of Heaven may not be the first book that comes to mind as one of her masterpieces (that honor would likely go to The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, or the EARTHSEA TRILOGY), it was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and won the Locus Award in 1972. It’s what I consider one of her smaller books, but still one of her best. What makes The Lathe of Heaven great is that it can tackle some of the biggest issues of the time — overpopulation, environmental destruction, war, racism, the lost soul of the modern world, exploration of the dreaming mind, alternate realities, and the urge to shape society for the better — all in under 200 pages. I really feel that is a lost art in this day of massive doorstoppers, multi-book mega-series, and self-indulgent info-dumps. The story is also simple in concept, with a very small cast of characters, so it could easily be a stage play and has been made into a film twice, once as a PBS production in 1980 and later as an A&E Network film in 2002. It centers on George Orr, an unremarkable man who happens to have “effective” dreams which alter reality. Horrified by this, he tries to suppress his dreams with drugs, but runs afoul of the law and is given the choice between therapy or a mental asylum. He chooses therapy, and is assigned Dr. William Haber. The early parts of the story detail the therapy sessions of George and Dr. Haber. George is a very passive, almost timid man. He doesn’t want to be in this situation, and certainly doesn’t want to be altering reality with his unconscious dreams. Dr. Haber is the polar opposite, a confident, brash, and aggressive man who quickly recognizes the potential to harness George’s dreams to shape reality in the ways he wants. Although he makes repeated and valid arguments as to why he should utilize this unique ability to do good and improve society and the world, each time he inserts suggestions to George such as “let’s imagine a world without overpopulation, war, pollution, racism, etc.,” the outcomes invariably are not what he expected and include some serious unforeseen side-effects. Notably, with each new iteration, Dr. Haber’s status and career seem to also improve. The middle portion of The Lathe of Heaven then explores a serious of alternate realities dreamed up by George’s unconscious with prompting from Dr. Haber. The ways in which things go wrong are quite ingenious, and it’s clear that Le Guin does not subscribe to the power fantasy that someone with the means has the right to shape society and reality to their liking without consultation, even with the best of intentions. As the worlds get stranger and more distorted, Dr. Haber hatches an idea that if he can replicate the process on himself, he can cut the reluctant George out of the equation and dream the world himself exactly to his specifications. This forms the climactic final events of the story. What adds interest to The Lathe of Heaven and places it firmly in the late 60s & early 70s is not just the political issues of the time, but also the underlying elements of Eastern philosophy, specifically the Taoist quotes at the beginnings of chapters from Chuang Tzu, as well as Tao Te Ching, The Book of the Way and Its Virtue by Lao Tzu, along with western philosophers such as H.G. Wells, Victor Hugo, and even Lafcadio Hearn. You can see how well-read Le Guin is and how much Eastern philosophy was gaining prominence and popularity in the West as an alternative to traditional Western philosophy, especially on college campuses and in intellectual circles. This is similar to the profound influence of the I Ching, The Book of Changes, in Philip K. Dick’s dystopian masterpiece of alternate reality, The Man in the High Castle. Taoist thinking can be found in the character of George. From many perspectives, this protagonist is very frustrating due to his passivity, reluctance to take any action to change the world around him, and instinctual distrust of authoritarian behavior. Whereas some people might seek to harness their powers to shape reality through dreams, George is repelled by this. Taoism is one of those slippery, non-dogmatic philosophies that espouses the pursuit of The Way though natural, uncontrived living. Disciples seek to discard the ills of civilization and material desires and pursue the simple, unadorned joys of a basic agrarian existence. One key concept is called Wu Wei, which is defined as “effortless action,” “non-action,” much as the planets orbit the sun without any effort, just following the natural rhythms of the universe. So while from a Western perspective George is a spineless man, afraid and reluctant to do anything with his powers of dreaming, from a Taoist perspective he might be a very dedicated individual trying to avoid doing harm to the natural order of the world around him. Of course this becomes an interesting point of debate in the story — if Taoists look to the ancient past of a simple existence as the ideal, does this principle still apply in the dystopian future society of George and Dr. Haber, living in massive towers packed with millions of people living on minimal rations due to overpopulation, a deteriorating environment, wars throughout Europe and the Middle East, and a general spiritual malaise? Faced with such conditions, is it wrong for Dr. Haber to want to change that? And is it right for George to resist any such manipulations? As always, it is the questions that Le Guin raises that are more important than the answers. The Lathe of Heaven is a concise, though-provoking journey into multiple realities and the dreaming unconscious, but is in no way an escape from reality. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 24, 2017
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Mar 06, 2017
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Feb 24, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0870541617
| 9780870541612
| 0870541617
| 4.10
| 167
| Jan 24, 1991
| Jan 01, 1991
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it was amazing
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The Ends of the Earth: Luminous, powerful stories of war, exotic locales, and supernatural horror Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Lucius Shepard The Ends of the Earth: Luminous, powerful stories of war, exotic locales, and supernatural horror Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Lucius Shepard had already created one of the best short story collections in the genre, The Jaguar Hunter, which won the 1988 World Fantasy Award and Locus Award for Best Collection, with “Salvador” winning the Locus Award in 1985 and “R&R” winning the Nebula Award in 1987. His work is steeped in magical realism, supernatural horror, Central America and other exotic locales, and hallucinatory depictions of futuristic warfare. In my opinion, Shepard is one of the best stylists to ever work in the genre. That’s why I can’t help including a writing sample from some stories in The Ends of the Earth — they’re just so good. It’s always tough to come up with a sophomore effort that lives up to the hype of the original. Fortunately, when you’ve lived as dramatic and eclectic life as Lucius Shepard, working a host of random jobs to support years of exploring obscure corners of the planet, that makes for fertile ground for great, memorable, and frightening stories. I’m always amazed by authors who can come up with fantastic tales just living in a quiet house in the suburbs, where the biggest event is when a squirrel sneaks onto the bird feeder or the neighbors’ dog gets loose. It’s a testament to the power of the human imagination, but nothing beats having BEEN to Central America and the Carribean, drinking rum at a beach-side shack with the locals late at night, and hanging out with the burned-out expats trying to escape our modern materialist society. And when you actually have the writing skills to craft stories that fascinate, repulse, and entertain, then you’ve got it made. And like The Jaguar Hunter, The Ends of the Earth also won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 1992. “The Ends of the Earth” (1989): This is a classic story that is immediately recognizable as a Shepard story. A successful writer named Ray has a failed affair with a married art gallery owner in New York and decided he needs to flee his life and civilization, and chooses an obscure town called Livingston in Guatemala. Being an author, he is fully aware of the artistic pretentious of seeking to escape to the ends of the earth to find inspiration in his own emotional pain along with the new environment so different from the busy streets of Manhattan. The bar — Café Pluto — was set in the lee of a rocky point: a thatched hut with a sand floor and picnic-style tables, lit with black lights that emitted an evil purple radiance and made all the gringos glow like sunburned corpses … I was giddy with the dope, with the wildness of the night, the vast blue-dark sky and its trillion watts of stars, silver glitters that appeared to be slipping around like sequins on a dancer’s gown. Behind us the Café Pluto had the look of an eerie cave lit by seams of gleaming purple ore. There he discovers the expected mixture of disillusioned ex-pats, impoverished locals, and drug-taking bohemian would-be artists. It’s all according to script, until he meets a rather unpleasant Brit named Carl who has set himself up as the top dog in the bohemian community, claiming to be writing an obscure academic work on local folklore and black magic, but supporting himself by selling drugs to other foreigners. Ray takes an instant dislike to Carl, not least because one Carl’s followers is an alluring young French woman named Odille, whom Ray is attracted to and who has her own emotional issues she is fleeing from. The scene is set for a classic love triangle in a tiny Guatemalan village, until one night Ray discovers a set of strange dolls that Carl has acquired from a local shaman. Supposedly they are part of an ancient game that Carl is studying, but he is very reticent to reveal more details, and when they all decide to get high on hashish and play the game, things quickly take a sinister turn… “Delta Sly Honey” (1987): Here is another Shepard story set in a war setting, this time behind the front lines in Vietnam. Randall J. Williams is a skinny and shy young Southern guy who transforms into the “High Priest of the Soulful Truth and the Holy Ghost of the Sixty-Cycle Hum.” Randall’s job is mainly to handle the bodies of dead soldiers, but one day a lifetime sergeant named Andrew Moon decides to make meek Randall his target of bullying. One day someone using the tag line Delta Sly Honey answers Randall’s broadcast, and he freaks out and goes AWOL. As the narrator investigates, things get more bizarre and horrific… “Bound for Glory” (1989): This is definitely a strange and memorable tale of a nightmarish train trip to Glory, a town in a post-apocalyptic Wild-West type of landscape where desperation triumphs over hope. The train passes through a strange series of border towns but the biggest danger is when it goes through the Patch, an area where the laws of physics, mysterious fauna, and behavior of the passengers all change unpredictably. Anybody who has read Jeff VanderMeer’s SOUTHERN REACH trilogy will recognize the eerie echoes of that occult sense of dread. The train guard Roy Cole patrols up and down the train cars, looking into the eyes of each passengers for the telltale signs of madness, and doesn’t hesitate to use his shotgun if he feels it is justified. When the narrator and his female companion Tracy go through the Patch and Tracy starts to transform, he is torn between protecting her from herself and Roy Cole, but he should really be more concerned about the changes that are happening to himself. The ending of the story truly turns things on their head, but you’ll have to read it to find out why. “The Exercise of Faith” (1987): Here’s a story that doesn’t resemble other Shepard stories I’ve read. The protagonist is a priest that heads a small group of parishioners. But he has an ability not generally available to men of the cloth. The opening paragraph describes it well: From my pulpit, carved of ebony into a long-snouted griffin’s head, I can see the sins of my parishioners. It’s as if a current is flowing from face to face, illuminating the secret meaning of every wrinkle and line and nuance of expression. They — like their sins — are an ordinary lot. Children as fidgety as gnats. Ruddy-cheeked men possessed by the demons of real estate, solid citizens with weak hearts and brutal arguments for wives. Women whose thoughts slide like swaths of gingham through their minds, married every one to lechers and layabouts. Knowing the innermost thoughts and sinful urges of his flock leads the priest to pursue some very deviant paths and deliver possibly the most perverse sermon of all time. Depending on your temperament, you may find it either hilarious or blasphemous. A very unusual story. “Nomans Land” (1988): This is the story of several sailors who get caught in vicious storm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard (which also features in Shepard’s story “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket”) and who find themselves stranded on a tiny deserted island appropriated named “Nomans Land”. The only survivors are Bert Cisneros, a mean-spirited Portuguese man, and the Irish cook Jack Tyrell. There is little friendship between the two, but they take shelter in an ominous bunker overnight. The next morning, Jack encounters a strange, haunted-seeming woman named Astrid who sees to be living alone on the island, an entomologist studying the ubiquitous tiny white spiders that seem to make their webs in every corner of the island. Jack and Astrid develop a lonely and desperate relationship that suddenly takes a turn to horror (Shepard’s favorite technique), and then goes far beyond, bringing our tenuous understanding of reality into question, as the little white spiders swarm over the island. “Life of Buddha” (1988): This is the first story in this collection that I just didn’t like. It’s the story of a heroin addict nicknamed Buddha that basically spends much of his time in a drugged-out stupor in a shooting gallery, ostensibly serving as security for his dealer. He has decided to shut out the painful memories of his family by losing himself in drugs, and encounters another lost soul who is also living in the margins and struggling with gender issues. There are some fantasy/horror elements, but I couldn’t care about the characters or the story much. “Shades” (1987): Here is a return to form for Shepard, as a Vietnamese man named Tom Puleo returns to Vietnam to cover a story about a young soldier named Stoner who died in a village called Cam Le. A Marxist mystic has invented a device that can summon ghosts, and Stoner’s ghost has come back to haunt the village, scaring the residents away and attracting foreign attention. As a fellow soldier with Stoner, the machine inventor wants to see if Stoner’s ghost will respond more to Tom. The story is filled with intense paranormal confrontations between Tom and Stoner’s ghost, and the ending is poignant. “Aymara” (1986): This was one of my favorite stories of the collection, another seamlessly-crafted take of revolution in Central America and the take of a gringo named Captain Lee Christmas who becomes deeply embroiled in Honduran politics at the turn of the century. The framing narrative is told by a political journalist named William who is fascinated by the story of Christmas and also looking to write a story about a mysterious US military facility and the growing presence of CIA agents around the town. As always, Shepard captures the details of the steamy daily life in the city, and when William begins a torrid love affair with an exotic dark-haired local woman named Ivie. The mystery behind the military facility involves scientists, exotic experiments, revolutionaries, and the two lovers in the middle of it all. The ending is wonderfully enigmatic, a great story. “A Wooden Tiger” (1988): Another classic Shepard tale of supernatural horror, embittered CIA agents, incarnations of the goddess Kumari, and sordid goings on in Katmandu. An ex-CIA chief named Clement decides to track down the most recent incarnation of the dark goddess Kumari, who regularly inhabits the bodies of young girls who are treated like goddesses until the spirit moves to the next one, at which point they are discarded and shunned. Clement tries to track down a former incarnation, now a mere mortal, and encounters his former mentor D’allesandro, who taught him all the dirty tricks in the book, but who was now gone rogue Lieutenant Kurtz-style. It’s all very murky and intriguing, exactly the type of story Shepard excels in without repeating himself. “The Black Clay Boy” (1987): This is a short and creepy story set in small-town Ohio, narrated by an old woman named Willa Selkie. She is a recluse, harassed by neighborhood boys with petty pranks. Then she reminisces back to hear early days as a beautiful young woman forced to marry a wealthy older man when she was just 18. Turns out Willa has a very intense libido that cannot be satisfied by her distant and old husband. When he discovers her pleasuring herself, he basically has a heart attack and curses her with his dying breath. She goes on to remarry, but again can’t get no satisfaction, turning to part-time prostitution just to get her fix, eventually setting her sights on a sexually-frustrated Reverend. As we flash back to the present, Willa turns now eyes on her Black Clay Boy, a type of voodoo doll, hoping for one last moment of pleasure… “Fire Zone Emerald” (1985): Another atmospheric and intense Shepard tale of high-tech soldiers in a Central American war zone, this time in the Guatemalan rain forest. The story begins with Quinn, a soldier injured and separated from his unit after an attack and explosion, finds himself alone in Fire Zone Emerald. He is hardly able to move, and when he gets an unexpected call on his com unit from someone named Mathis of Special Forces who seems sympathetic but may have gone rogue, Quinn is suspicious. The story becomes a cat-and-mouse game as Quinn tries to evade Mathis, with some very tense action sequences. What’s that you say? Where is the trademark dark supernatural element that distinguishes Shepard’s stories? Well, you should discuss that with the queen, who takes the shape of a tiger and can place thoughts in your mind… “On the Border” (1987): This was one of my favorite stories — a desert-based tale of desperate and marginalized hoodlums who try to rise above their origins, the classic pursuit of a reward for the kidnapping of the beautiful daughter of a rich man, and some magical realism in a surreal brujo in the desert and a bizarre mountain village that may be a total head trip into a psychedelic and violent denouement. It’s a taught tale with a lean and mean James Ellroy feel, but with the empathy of Shepard’s love of outcasts and the glimpses of sublime spiritual mysteries hiding in the sordid corners of our world. “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” (1988): This is one of the longest stories in the collection and is part of Shepard’s ongoing series of fantasy stories about Griaule, the giant dormant dragon who has been trapped by a magician’s spell and has become a part of the local geography, but still exerts a subtle and sinister influence on the human communities that surround it. This story is about Catherine, the daughter of a scalehunter in Hangtown who makes his living chipping away loose scales to sell in the nearby town. She is beautiful, as the title states, but also vain and selfish, toying with the hearts of the young men and stealing them away from their girlfriends just for the malicious fun of it. One day she is resting alone and is assaulting by a village thug, and in the struggle to resist his attempted rape, she accidently kills him with her scaling hook. She is then forced to flee into the dragon’s mouth as his vengeful brothers try to kill her. Thus begins a very surreal odyssey inside the body of Griaule, which turns out to be inhabited by all sorts of bizarre and disturbing creatures much like something from Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth or Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean, and more importantly a lost colony of humans called feelies, descended from a pair of retarded villagers many generations past. They have formed a strange and degenerate society that seems to be swayed by the inscrutable and dark influence of Griaule’s thoughts. Catherine is taken into this society and gradually falls into the rhythms of this subterranean world, a prisoner of both the feelies and the dragon’s pervasive presence. Then one day a young scientist enters her world, changing everything. This is one of those tales with metaphorical overtones that dares you to interpret both the situation and events and discover the hidden themes and messages. However, much like his award-winning story “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” while the story is fraught with meaning, the exact interpretation of what the dragon represents is elusive and will vary from reader to reader. Is the dragon a dormant god, exerting a sinister influence on human affairs for his own unknowable reasons, or an embodiment of a more subtle evil that is not divine in nature? Themes of free will, self-determination, and imprisonment are also explored, and the will to adapt to captivity. Guilt, revenge, love, escape, freedom, and good/evil; it’s all there in a fairytale format that also reminded me of Ursula K. LeGuin’s short stories. “Surrender” (1989): The final story is a confluence of all Shepard’s favorite elements: a dismal Central American military conflict, corrupt militia groups involved in nefarious scientific experiments, jaded journalists who discover things are even more screwed-up than their cynical outlooks were prepared to handle, and dark gun battles against subhuman creatures in dark and dangerous jungles and caves. The narrator gives the story its sarcastic attitude and challenges the reader to have an opinion of the endless miseries of US involvement in Central American wars and state-building, its failures and hypocrisy, and what we think of it while kicking back with a cold one from the comfort of our sofas in front of the TV watching ABC news and Monday Night Football. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 11, 2017
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Nov 16, 2017
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Jan 06, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1596064560
| 9781596064560
| 1596064560
| 3.97
| 419
| May 31, 2012
| May 31, 2012
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Jan 06, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1846141656
| 9781846141652
| 1846141656
| 4.13
| 4,210
| 1997
| May 28, 2009
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really liked it
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The Complete Cosmicomics: Cosmic Tales of the Universe’s Origins Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Along with his brilliant Invisible Cities(1972 The Complete Cosmicomics: Cosmic Tales of the Universe’s Origins Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Along with his brilliant Invisible Cities(1972 in Italian, 1974 in English), one of Italo Calvino’s most enduring creations was his series of whimsical and erudite stories inspired by the origins of the universe and scientific principles, labeled Cosmicomics (1965 in Italian, 1968 in English). They are narrated by a mysterious being called Qfwfq, who tells of the Big Bang and the time before that when the universe was a single point without space or dimensions. Qfwfq has a refreshingly frank and humorous attitude towards such momentous moments as the birth of our universe, the origins of life, the extinction of the dinosaurs, the first animals to crawl onto land, the early days of the Moon, etc. If you seek out these stories, you will find that the most recent edition includes much more than the original 12 stories. Now, for the same price you can buy in print or e-book all 34 collected Cosmicomics stories, published as The Complete Cosmicomics (2009). This comprises the original Cosmicomics (1965), t-zero (1967, also published in English as Time and the Hunter), and World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories (a collection never published in a single English volume, with eight new stories, seven of which are translated into English for the first time for the 2009 collection). It’s an overused expression, but these stories truly defy easy description. Calvino believed that modern fiction was not addressing the most important new developments in cosmology and science in the context of the mid-1960s and amid the space race between the US and Soviet Union. So he took it upon himself to address these topics with a literary approach, and on top of that add a whimsical tone to otherwise obtuse concepts like the Big Bang and dimensionless space. He also added a romantic element to these stories, as his protagonist Qfwfq is often pining after an elusive female companion, pursuing her across lunar landscapes, deep in the primordial earth, or in the farthest corners of the universe. So the big distinction with science fiction is that Calvino is fascinated with our origins, and at the same time uses the lens of literature to inform his comic tales. I will split my review into three parts to do justice to each section. Cosmicomics (5 stars) These are probably Calvino’s most accessible and enjoyable stories, and the first US edition translated by William Weaver won the National Book Award for a Translation in 1969. The first story in particular, “The Distance to the Moon”, combines all the elements I’ve described in a delightful tale of the early days when the Moon was much closer to the Earth, and the poignant love story that enfolds around it. It’s tells the story of Qfwfq, Captain Vhd Vhd, his wife, and Qfwfq’s deaf cousin, who took little boats on the ocean to harvest the milk of the Moon using a ladder, big spoons, and buckets. The distance between the Earth and Moon is so short that a tall ladder is enough to get there, and gravity reverses midway so you are drawn to the Moon past a certain point, and appear to be hanging upside down from the Earth perspective. Calvino’s descriptions of this bizarre and fantastic situation are wonderful: In reality, from the top of the ladder, standing erect on the last rung, you could just touch the Moon if you held your arms up. I would cling first with one hand, then with both, and immediately I would feel ladder and boat drifting away from below me, and the motion of the Moon would tear me from the Earth’s attraction. Yes, the Moon was so strong that she pulled you up; you realized this the moment you passed from one to the other: you had to swing up abruptly, with a kind of somersault, grabbing the scales, throwing your legs over your head, until your feet were on the Moon’s surface. Seen from the Earth, you looked as if you were hanging there with your head down, but for you, it was the normal position, and the only odd thing was that when you raised your eyes you saw the sea above you, glistening, with the boat and the others upside down, hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine. There they harvest the milk of the Moon, which is a truly unique and somewhat stomach-churning concoction: Moon-milk was very thick, like a kind of cream cheese. It formed in the crevices between one scale and the next, through the fermentation of various bodies and substances of terrestrial origin which had flown up from the prairies and forests and lakes, as the Moon sailed over them. It was composed chiefly of vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, molds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue. There develops a strange love triangle between Qfwfq, the Captain’s wife, and Qfwfq’s deaf cousin whose only passion is harvesting the Moon’s milk and exploring its scaly and alien terrain. I was surprisingly moved by the ending of this story, as I had initially expected Calvino’s story not to be centered on human relationships. This story is creative, literate, whimsical, and magical, and if you are interested in this collection I think it will win you over. The remaining 11 stories are of equally high quality and charm, and explore a wide range of concepts and themes. Taken as whole, they are an amazing achievement and unique in the annals of fantastic literature. Time and the Hunter (2 stars) This set of stories is a very different creature indeed. It consists of three parts, “More of Qfwfq”, “Priscilla”, and “t zero”. These stories are far more experimental, formalistic, complex, mathematical, and frequently impossible to follow. In many ways they bear little resemblance to the stories from Cosmicomics, so in reviewing them I gave them a 3 star rating. I will separately review each part. “More of Qfwfq” This part consists of four stories, “The Soft Moon”, “The Origin of the Birds”, “Crystals”, and “Blood, Sea”. These stories ostensibly are narrated by Qfwfq, but his presence is fairly limited, and the stories often occupy modern environments, but still exploring Calvino’s themes of the romantic pursuit of the Moon, the evolution of birds shown via cartoon strip, the elements that make up the Earth juxtaposed onto New York, and the story of how life in the oceans made its way into our bodies via blood cells. It’s a much more cerebral literary experimental, and much of the playfulness is gone, but it does represent Calvino’s tireless drive to reinvent literary conventions to tackle modern themes. “Priscilla” This is a set of three linked stories, “Mitosis”, “Meiosis”, and “Death”, and I found these stories almost impossible to read or understand, as this passage will show: So I am speaking then of the initial phase of a love story which afterwards is probably repeated in an interminable multiplication of initial phases just like the first and identified with the first, a multiplication or rather a squaring, an exponential growth of stories which is always tantamount to the first story, but it isn’t as if I were so very sure of all this, I assume it as you can also assume it. I’m referring to an initial phase that precedes the other initial phases, a first phase which must surely have existed, because it’s logical to expect it to exist, and also because I remember it very well, and when I say it’s the first I don’t in the least mean first in the absolute sense, that’s what you’d like me to mean but I don’t; I mean first in the sense that we can consider any of these identical initial phases the first, and the one I refer to is the one I remember, the one I remember as first in the sense that before it I don’t remember anything. And as for the first in the absolute sense, your guess is as good as mine, I’m not interested. My mind was reeling after pages of this type of exposition. It just went on and on, without any conceivable storyline. It’s very much a literary experiment, but for me these stories had no appeal. “t zero” This is the set of four stories that really go off the deep end of mathematical experimental literature, and I challenge anyone other than a theoretical mathematician with an advanced literature degree out there to make any sense of the stories at all. It was so completely impenetrable that I just skimmed through the pages until they became a blur. You’re welcome to give them a try, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Again, a sample may help to illustrate what I mean: I find myself in a random space-time intermediary point of a phase of the universe; after hundreds of millions of billions of seconds here the arrow and the lion and I and the bush have found ourselves as we now find ourselves, and this second will be promptly swallowed up and buried in the series of the hundreds of millions of billions of seconds that continues, independently of the outcome, a second from now, of the convergent or divergent flight of the lion and of the arrow; then at a certain point the course will reverse its direction, the universe will repeat its vicissitude backwards, from the effects the causes will punctually arise… it will be forgotten in the dispersal of billions of combinations of neurons within the lobes of brains, so that no one will know he’s living in reversed time just as I myself am not now sure in which direction the time I move in is moving, and if the then I’m waiting for has not in reality already happened just a second ago, bearing with it my salvation or my death. World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories (4 stars) These stories represent a welcome return to the tales of the world’s early days, narrated by Qfwfq in his inimitable style. After the incomprehensible mess of “t zero”, it was nice to read more of the fables of how the moon formed from the sea, waves of land thrusting themselves up from the primordial seas, carrying various odd characters on their crests (“The Mushroom Moon”), a very haunting story of the decrepit old Moon and it’s encounter with a modern-world junkyard and the efforts of an army of young women in an ultra-modern ultra-consumerist New York to save the Moon (“The Daughters of the Moon”). Here is a memorable image: We crossed one of the bridges that link Manhattan to the mainland. Now we were going along a multi-lane highway, with other cars alongside us, and I kept my eyes fixed on the road ahead, fearing the laughter and crude comments that the sight of the two of us was no doubt prompting in the cars on either side. But when a saloon car overtook us, I nearly went off the road in surprise: crouched on its roof was a girl with her hair spread out in the wind. For a second I thought my passenger was leaping from one fast-moving car to another, but all I had to do was turn my eyes round ever so slightly to see that Diana’s knees were still there at the same height as my nose. And it was not just her body that glowed before my eyes: I saw girls everywhere, stretched out in the strangest of poses, clinging to the radiators, doors, mudguards of the speeding cars—their golden or dark hair was the only thing that contrast with the pale or dark gleam of their skin. One of these mysterious female passengers was positioned on every car, all stretching forwards, urging the drivers to follow the Moon. He also includes “The Stone Sky”, an inversion of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which two being dwell within the Earth’s core, but the female named Rdix has this irresistible urge to explore the upper layers near the crust where ephemeral beings (like humans) dwell. Calvino’s imagery here is again unique and refreshing - he delights in inverting our conventional perspectives and examining non-human perspectives: Border areas, passages between one earthly layer and another, gave her a mild vertigo. We knew that the Earth is made up of superimposed roofs, like the skins of an enormous onion, and that every roof leads you to a roof higher up, and all of them together prefigure the final roof, the point where the Earth ceases to be Earth, where all the inside is left on this side, and beyond there is only the outside. For you this border of the Earth is identified with the Earth itself; you think the sphere is the surface that wraps it, and not its total volume; you have always lived in that flat, flat dimension and you don’t even imagine that one can live elsewhere and in a different way. For us at that time, this border was something we knew existed, but we didn’t think we could see it without leaving the Earth, a prospect which seemed to us not so much frightful as absurd. That was where everything was flung out in eruptions and bituminous spurts and smoke-holes, everything that the Earth expelled from its innards: gases, liquid mixtures, volatile elements, base matter, all types of waste. It was the world in negative, something that we could not picture even in our minds, the abstract idea of it was enough to give us a shiver of disgust, no, of anxiety; or rather a stunned sensation, a kind of—as I said—vertigo (yes, that’s it, our reactions were more complex than you might think, especially Rdix’s), into which their crept an element of fascination, a kind of attraction to the void, to anything double-faced or absolute. ...more |
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Oct 15, 2016
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| 4.03
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Ficciones: Requires deep knowledge of 19th and 20th century literature and philosophy to fully appreciate Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Before Ficciones: Requires deep knowledge of 19th and 20th century literature and philosophy to fully appreciate Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Before being labelled a Phillistine for not understanding most of this book, let me just head that off by acknowledging it fully. I consider myself quite well-read in the SF & Fantasy genres, but abjectly ignorant of the vast majority of literary classics and classical philosophies. I never read Shopenhauer or Liebnitz, who are mentioned in several stories, and more fatally I have never read any major religious texts, including the Old and New Testaments, Talmud, or Koran. So really, these stories are largely wasted on me. Sure, it would be nice to rectify this and spend the next few decades becoming versed in the entire canon of 19th and 20th century literature and philosophy, but that just isn’t practical or appealing. Instead I devote my reading time to covering the SFF genre as widely as possible. In fact, the only reason I decided to finally read Borges is because of his pervasive influence on fabulists, magic realists, and basically a whole range of writers of the fantastic. His name comes up so frequently it is just hard to ignore. And since his stories are so short, I thought it was about time to at least try them and see how much I could get out of them. I was actually quite excited to notice that Borges likes to mention Gnostics and demi-urges, two ideas that obsessed Philip K Dick, particularly after his bizarre religion experience with a pink beam of pure information from space. I also caught a very direct Borges reference in Gene Wolfe’s BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, which I am revisiting in audiobook now, in the sinister and powerful mirrors of Father Inire of House Absolute, which feature labyrinth patterns and are used to summon beings from across space and time. Clearly Wolfe is a big Borges fan, and I bet he understands his work more than I do. In the end, of all the stories in the two parts, The Garden of Forked Paths and Artifices, there were only four stories in the first part that I felt engaged me and didn’t leave me completely lost in a labyrinth of dense literary and philosophical references, complex multi-level structural games, and and elaborate artifice. Borges is in love with literature and philosophical ideas, but without sufficient background and intellect, I’m afraid most of these stories will leave many readers lost and despairing in the labyrinth of his words. The stories I did like were “The Circular Ruins”, “The Lottery of Babylon”, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, and “The Library of Babel”. The last story in particular I found so mind-blowing and incredible that it almost made up for the struggles I had with the rest of the collection. It essential explores the concept of the infinite and the sum and total of human knowledge and how minuscule and futile it is to search for ultimate truth (that was my take on it at least). He uses the metaphor of an infinite series of interconnected hexagonal rooms, each with four bookshelves containing 410-page books with text comprising an infinite combination of 25 total characters. It’s a very sophisticated version of the infinite number of monkeys hammering at typewriters idea, with one eventually likely to compose Shakespeare’s complete works. Borges takes the idea and deconstructs it with such intelligence, wit, and erudition that I was astounded. It is definitely a story that bears rereading. The same goes for the other three stories mentioned above. However, I can’t say that repeated reads of the others would necessarily be worthwhile. After all, I still won’t be thoroughly versed in classical literature no matter how many times I read them. It’s probably as futile as me trying to hammer at a typewriter, hoping to eventually compose the complete works of Shakespeare in Ancient Greek. This is particularly true for the stories that are essentially parodies of the endlessly recursive and futile exercise of academic endeavor, in which Borges creates completely artificial books and schools of thought, and then delves deep into study of them. It’s a very self-indulgent form of erudition in my opinion, essentially showing off that he is so thoroughly knowledgeable about various schools of study and thought that he can create them from thin air just as an intellectual exercise. He actually spells this out in his introduction, which is perhaps the most accessible part of the book: The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary…More reasonable, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary book. Such are “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain”, “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim”. The bottom line is that Borges is an essential pioneer of magic realism and extremely intellectual stories about ideas and philosophy, but the hurdle of comprehension is extremely high, so you’ve been warned. ...more |
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really liked it
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The Best of Lucius Shepard: His earlier stories are better Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I’ll come right out and say it. Lucius Shepard was on The Best of Lucius Shepard: His earlier stories are better Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I’ll come right out and say it. Lucius Shepard was one of the best SF short story writers of the 1980 and 1990s. His prose, imagery, themes, and style are so powerful, dynamic, and vivid that it’s a real crime that he didn’t gain a wider readership when he was alive, though he did win many SF awards. Although he had already been publishing his stories in SF magazines like SF&F and Asimov’s for several years, he gained greater prominence with his short story collection The Jaguar Hunter in 1987, which won the 1988 World Fantasy Award and Locus Award for Best Collection. Many of the stories were nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, with “Salvador” winning the Locus Award in 1985 and “R&R” winning the Nebula Award in 1987. His work is characterized by strong elements of magic realism, supernatural horror, Central American and other exotic locales, and hallucinatory depictions of futuristic warfare. In my opinion, he is one of the best stylists to ever work in the genre. Lucius Shepard was one of those authors who seemed compelled to travel and experience the world, working a host of unusual jobs to survive. You can get his bio details on the internet, but suffice to say he travelled extensively in Europe, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America, and most of his stories are set in exotic locales with vivid details. His characters are generally dislocated ex-pats, spiritually-lost bohemians, or soldiers trapped in hopeless Central American military conflicts, and they frequently encounter supernatural events that cannot be explained by science. His story “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” is very much a magic realist parable about evil and the power of art to combat it. While not all of his books are still in print, you can get his most important ones: his short story collections The Jaguar Hunter (1987), The Ends of the Earth (1991), and The Best of Lucius Shepard (2008), and his novels Green Eyes (1984) and Life During Wartime (1987). If you are looking for a cheap intro to his stories, The Best of Lucius Shepard is available for just $2.99 on Amazon. However, in my opinion his greatest and most memorable stories were written in the earlier part of his career, so I would strongly recommend The Jaguar Hunter and The Ends of the Earth over this retrospective, since they contain his best work. I actually found it quite a struggle to get through the later stories in his “Best of” collection, as his interests moved away from his Central American magic realist/futuristic war motif to a focus on the poor and marginalized corners of American society. It’s certainly a legitimate artistic choice to make, and it’s hard to fault an author for not being satisfied to stir the same pot again and again, but the quality and focus of the stories towards the end of the collection just couldn’t keep my attention. In particular, I just couldn’t see the point of “Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?” It is always risky to use a narrator who is inarticulate and uneducated, as Shepard can no longer use the incredible artistry of his writing, so it was a frustrating experience. At least “Jailwise,” while the final message was elusive, was hallucinatory and strange and beautiful. Here are the stories in the Kindle version (“R&R” is not in the original publication): “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” (1984): This is one of Shepard’s most famous stories, and the most clear homage to the legendary Latin American magic realists Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The story is a parable open to many interpretations, and is written very much in the style of Borges (who I am reading right now). It centers on the man Meric Cattanay and his proposal to destroy the dragon and its dark influence on the surrounding lands and people by painting its body with a wondrous mural. It pits art against a dark influence so subtle that it defies description. Meric devotes four decades to painting the dragon, going through the many vicissitudes of life, both ups and downs, triumphs and disappointments, and eventually reaches the end of his labors. It is a mysterious and ambiguous story, but well worth reading. Notably, Shepard wrote several more stories that share the same themes and framework, collected as The Dragon Griaule (2013) by Subterranean Press. “Salvador” (1984): This story is one of the highlights of the collection. It is about Dantzler, a US special forces soldier stationed in El Salvador hunting for Sandinista patrols. It has strong echoes of films like Platoon, as Dantzler’s ideals and admiration for the local culture are dashed by the casual contempt and mind-numbing violence of the military mindset, particularly a psychotic superior officer who has become a sadistic killing machine assisted by ampules to boost reflexes, alertness, and homicidal urges. It is a chilling but realistic depiction of war, yet Shepard’s writing remains lyrical and powerful nonetheless. “A Spanish Lesson” (1985): This is definitely an unusual story with a fantastical twist much like “A Traveler’s Tale.” It is the story of a young traveling expat who settles in a small Mediterranean fishing village that has an enclave of bohemian foreigners who spend much of their time taking and dealing drugs, dabbling in novels and poetry, and feeling superior to the surrounding locals. One day a very strange young pair of twins, blond, frail, and awkward, show up in their village and start to disrupt the rhythms of life. Things get extremely weird when the narrator finds a secret diary entry by the twins, and it is definitely not what you would expect. “The Jaguar Hunter” (1985): The title story is a perfect example of Shepard’s favorite themes. A retired jaguar hunter named Esteban lives in the countryside of Honduras with his unhappy wife. She yearns for the trappings of Western material culture, so she buys a TV on credit from the local pawn shop without permission, putting Esteban into debt. Lacking the cash to pay this, the sleazy shop owner asks him instead to kill a deadly black jaguar that has killed eight other hunters. Despite his misgivings, he takes the assignment and soon encounters the black jaguar, which is far more formidable than he expected. The writing in this story is phenomenal, and the story behind the jaguar is rich with mysticism and tragedy. “R & R” (1986): This story won the Nebula Award in 1987 and was later expanded to Shepard’s best-regarded full-length novel, Life During Wartime. It is similar to “Salvador” in that it features soldiers stationed in Guatemala for R&R in a break from bombing raids in Nicaragua. The Sikorsky helicopter gunship pilots use special high-tech helmets that link them to their machines, blurring the lines between, and yet the pilots are so superstitious that they refuse to remove their helmets even when on the ground. Mignolla and his buddies take R&R together out of a belief that if they follow the same routine each time they will survive unscathed. This is nearly novella-length, and much befalls Mignolla in hallucinatory, magic-realist, unnerving detail. “The Arcevoalo” (1986): One of Shepard’s most fable-like and magic-realist stories, but wedded to a far future Amazon jungle setting after the September War, which has transformed the region in magical ways. A young man awakes in the ruined city of Manaus, and seeks to discover his origins and purpose. He is surrounded by the mystical creatures of the jungle, and has an intense bond with their life forces and that of the jungle itself. He learns he is called the arcevoalo, and that his purpose is on behalf of the jungle to enter the world of men and learn their nature and weaknesses. He finds himself entering the decadent walled city of Sangue do Lume, settled by Brazilians who fled the September War and dwelt in the metal worlds that circle the sky before returning to Earth. There he is taken in by one of the wealthy families of the city, who value his mysterious origins and incredible knowledge of the jungle which they seek to exploit for their profit. The arcevoalo finds himself assisting in the exploitation of the very jungle that nurtured him, and then becomes embroiled in a classic love triangle with tragic results. The entire story is a luminous fable of discovery, treachery, the loss of innocence and the eternal battle between mankind and the jungle. “Shades” (1987): Here is a return to form for Shepard, as a Vietnam vet named Tom Puleo returns to Vietnam to cover a story about a young soldier named Stoner who died in a village called Cam Le. A Marxist mystic has invented a device that can summon ghosts, and Stoner’s ghost has come back to haunt the village, scaring the residents away and attracting foreign attention. As a fellow soldier with Stoner, the machine inventor wants to see if Stoner’s ghost will respond more to Tom. The story is filled with intense paranormal confrontations between Tom and Stoner’s ghost, and the ending is poignant. “Delta Sly Honey” (1987): Here is another Shepard story set in a war setting, this time behind the front lines in Vietnam. Randall J. Williams is a skinny and shy young Southern guy who transforms into the “High Priest of the Soulful Truth and the Holy Ghost of the Sixty-Cycle Hum.” Randall’s job is mainly to handle the bodies of dead soldiers, but one day a lifetime sergeant named Andrew Moon decides to make meek Randall his target of bullying. One day someone using the tag line Delta Sly Honey answers Randall’s broadcast, and he freaks out and goes AWOL. As the narrator investigates, things get more bizarre and horrific… “Life of Buddha” (1988): This is the only story in this collection that I just didn’t like. It’s the story of a heroin addict nicknamed Buddha that basically spends much of his time in a drugged-out stupor in a shooting gallery, ostensibly serving as security for his dealer. He has decided to shut out the painful memories of his family by losing himself in drugs, and encounters another lost soul who is also living in the margins and struggling with gender issues. There are some fantasy/horror elements, but I couldn’t care about the characters or the story much. “Jack’s Decline” (1988): Here Shepard explores new territory that many writers have been drawn to, namely who Jack the Ripper was and what became of him. Imagine he was from a wealthy family who would go to great lengths to protect him and his killing madness from discovery. And even though he is given a long list of treatments, and he tries all forms of study and distractions, his inner demon will not let him rest. And then one day his remote hunting lodge in the countryside is visited by a small troop of Nazi soldiers who have brought with them some captive young Jewish women as their entertainment. Things get very twisted as one form of evil meets another, with innocent lives caught in between. “Beast of the Heartland” (1992): In a complete change of pace, this is a powerful and visceral story of Bobby Mears, a heavyweight boxer who has tangled with the likes of Marvin Hagler in his only title fight, but whose retina has become detached and is now a brawler who better fighters use to tune up as they climb the ranks. And yet he perseveres, continuing to win his share of fight through sheer tenacity. Much in the Rocky Balboa vein, he is an everyman whose only route of success is training and fighting in the ring. Though the story does not feature magical creatures or futuristic soldiers in Central American jungle wars, it does have an element of mysticism, as Mears has strange visions of beasts that he projects onto the face of his opponents, which gives him the added push to keep punching past his limitations. There is also the young hooker with the heart of gold, the crusty old trainer Leon, and the invincible opponent that he must face. It has all the makings of a stereotypical boxer-in-decline story, but in Shepard’s hands it packs a real emotional punch. “Radiant Green Star” (2000): Though this story is far more cyberpunk in setting than many of the others, it is equally the timeless story of a young orphan raised in a small traveling circus called the Radiant Green Star. He was given into the care of the owner of the circus, Vang, at age 7 by his mother, and has only hazy memories of her. Vang tells him his father had his mother killed and that he stands to inherit a fortune from his grandfather upon his 18th birthday, but to avoid his father taking control he has been hidden away till he has reached the age to inherit his birthright. The story is set in a futuristic Viet Nam, complete with digitally stored personalities, cybernetic impacts, and biologically-enhanced assassins and powerful tech corporations. However, Shepard revels in mixing genres by overlaying the story of Phillip’s coming of age story with a traveling circus, and even includes a grotesque circus freak named Major Martin Boyette, supposedly the last surviving US POW, who is hideously deformed by genetic experiments. His audience draw is not just his hideous appearance but his ability to tell elaborate and dramatic stories of the war, but when not on stage he withdraws into his own private world of madness. Philip harbors a deep-seated desire to kill his father to avenge his poor mother, while the circus owner grooms him to take over the circus one day. Appearances and motivations are very deceptive, however, and for a novella the story is impressively layered and complex. Philip falls in love with his fellow troupe member Tan, and for a time he lives a happy existence. However, the story soon brings back the underlying tragedy of his past as he discovers that the troupe will be performing in the secluded and wealthy enclave town where his powerful and corrupt father lives. There are the obvious echoes of Oedipus as he confronts his father, and when his origins are finally revealed, there are many surprises awaiting. Overall, this story is impressive in its combination of themes and plots, all told in Shepard’s signature rich and evocative style. “Only Partly Here” (2003): This story represents a new direction for Shepard. It’s a story about 9/11 and the workers clearing the debris of the site in the aftermath. They spend their days shoveling away bits of building, office equipment, clothing, and occasionally bodies. It is grim work, and Bobby, Pineo, and Mazurek are pals of sorts, united by the numbing drudgery of the job and the haunting atmosphere where thousands lost their lives in one fateful day. They take to going to a dive called The Blue Lady, but don’t want to talk about the job, but rather to erase it with booze. One day a severe, Wall Street-type woman starts showing up at the bar, blowing off would-be pickup artists, and Bobby, who unlike his pals is a graduate student, takes a morbid curiosity as to why she shows every day just to drink in sullen silence… “Jailwise” (2003): A lengthy and somewhat Kafka-esque story of a lifelong convict named Tommy Penhaligon with an intense anti-authority streak who is offered taken on by a mentor named Frank Ristelli who teaches art classes near the prison and discovers that Tommy has quite a talent for painting. Frank also has a unique philosophical view of incarceration, punishment, repentance, and redemption. He recommends to Tommy that he request a transfer from Vacaville to a mysterious prison facility named Diamond Bar built into a mountain in the wilderness of the West Coast. This place has no apparent guards, fences, or even locked cells. Though he is initially suspicious, he takes the offer and discovers a strange world run by prisoners that seem quite content with being there. They live their daily lives without any explicit or rules, but controlled by a strange council of elderly inmates who appear to be in charge. Tommy seeks to find out the origins of Diamond Bar and how it can function completely unlike any other prison. When the council discover Tommy’s talent for paintings, they ask him to paint a giant mural to depict the Hearth of the Law, the fundamental principal that underpins Diamond Bar. Tommy also encounters the plumes, seemingly transgender men who serve as sexual partners for the inmates. He forms a relationship with one that seems to be in all respects female, and she also inspires his artwork as his muse. This story eludes any easy interpretations, and while further revelations await in the final parts of the story, and center on the themes mentioned above, it is always unclear what parts of the story are “real” or just “in his mind,” and there is a surreal and archetypal feel to the events. It’s both an evolution from and departure from the magic realist elements that pervaded Shepard’s earlier stories from the 1980s. “Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?” (2004): This is another lengthy story about down and out characters living in the margins, in the intersection between crime and poverty and desperation. A young never-do-well named Maceo in South Florida meets up with another fringe dweller named Leeli. They have a tryst and wander onto a supposedly abandoned government property where they encounter a strange older woman named Ava who has two strange men in tow, Carl and Squire. They aren’t all there mentally, and the exact nature of the trio’s relationship is unclear, but Ava exudes a strange vibe of confidence and supernatural powers. They get into trouble when Carl suddenly pulls out a gun at a diner and yells, “Hands up! Who wants to die?” He’s too stupid to realize what he’s doing, but before they know it they’re on the run and hiding out in a swampy Southern Gothic property, where things get kinky and weird. However, much like “Jailwise,” the weirdness is quite unfocused and elusive, very unlike the powerful South American magic-realist images of Shepard’s earlier stories. Partly his choice of characters is to blame — since the uneducated Maceo is the narrator, we get the story told in his broken-down street lingo, which prevents Shepard from exercising his most lyrical and hallucinatory writing. I didn’t like the characters or the story, and felt like this was not a direction I wanted to follow the author in. ...more |
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| 0679734457
| 9780679734451
| 0679734457
| 3.82
| 9,081
| Jun 1981
| Jul 02, 1991
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really liked it
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The Divine Invasion: A dense gnostic allegory about salvation Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote several boo The Divine Invasion: A dense gnostic allegory about salvation Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote several books about suffering, redemption, and the divine in the contexts of Christian Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, anamnesis, and the dualistic nature of the ultimate divine being. After writing two books that explored his personal religious experiences in 1974, Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976 but not published until 1985) and VALIS (written in 1978 but published in 1981), he wrote The Divine Invasion (written in 1980 but published in 1981), The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (written in 1981 but published in 1982), and an unfinished novel called The Owl in Daylight. Radio Free Albemuth was the first version of what was rewritten as VALIS, and The Divine Invasion and The Owl in Daylight were intended as a thematic trilogy. However, after PDK’s death in 1982, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was substituted for the unfinished The Owl in Daylight and grouped together as the VALIS TRILOGY. The Divine Invasion is dense religious allegory that begins with some of the familiar SF elements frequently in PDK’s earlier novels but quickly delves into his ideas about gnosis (finding knowledge, enlightenment or salvation by recognizing a higher spiritual realm separate from the material world), anamnesis (the process of “losing forgetfulness” or regaining knowledge), and the dualistic nature of the divine Godhead, which was separated in the Fall into a superior supreme being and a lesser creator god (a “demiurge”) who shaped the material world that humans live in. The plot is very complex, but here goes. Herb Asher lives a solitary life on a planet called CY30-CY30B, where colonists live in isolated domes. Herb is contacted by a local deity named Yah, who contacts him in a vision and demands that he help his neighbor Rybys Rommey, a woman who is sick with multiple scleroisis and also is pregnant with Yah’s baby via immaculate conception. Herb has been a recluse content to listen endlessly to the pop music of star Linda Fox and handling communications for the colony. With the help of a bearded beggar named Elias Tate, who is the immortal incarnation of the prophet Elijah, Herb agrees to serve as husband to Rybys (like Joseph to Mary), and they travel to Earth along with Elias, ostensibly to cure her illness. However, the Earth is ruled by a Christian-Islamic Church and a Scientific Legate who are warned of the arrival of this reincarnation of Yahweh (by an A.I. system humorously named the Big Noodle) and consider this a “Divine Invasion” and threat to their dominion of the planet. But in reality, it is the fallen angel Belial who rules this world and enslaves humanity in the prison of the material world. The authorities pursue Herb and Rybys, seeking to kill the unborn child who will be Yahweh. They escape various attempts but finally are involved in a fatal car accident which puts Herb in a coma and kills Rybys. Herb’s body is placed in cryogenic storage while waiting for a spleen replacement, and the child Emmanuel survives but suffers a head injury that causes amnesia. Meanwhile, Elias Tate manages to save the child and smuggles it to safety. Emmanuel grows up in a special school with another girl named Zina, and she gradually helps him remember his divine origins through the process of anamnesis. It becomes clear through a series of dense philosophical discussions that Emmanuel and Zina are both aspects of the divine Godhead that was split asunder in the Fall, and that it is up to both halves to unite again and heal a sick and corrupt world. Zina reveals to Emmanuel a more idyllic parallel universe in which both Herb and Rybys are still alive. Even more strangely, Belial is nothing but a baby goat in a NY zoo. Feeling bad for it, they innocently free the goat, but Belial seizes the opportunity to regain control of this parallel world. In this world, Herb works at a high-end electronic sound system store, and encounters a beautiful young aspiring singer named Linda Fox, who he knows will become a huge star in the future. He falls in love with her, but is tricked by Belial the goat into confronting her. Eventually, Linda Fox fights and defeats Belial, freeing the world of his evil and saving Herb in the process. Though very dense and confusing at first, The Divine Invasion reveals itself as an allegory of how the two separate aspects of the divine being, in the form of the creator Yahweh (reborn in human form as the child Emmanuel) and the feminine aspect that remained in the material world to look after and protect mankind (represented by the girl Zina Pallas and Linda Fox). The two riven parts of the Godhead must recall via anamnesis that they are one entity, and thus united confront the fallen angel Belial, who controls the material world and keeps mankind subjected to his corrupt vision of reality. The conflict between the divine and Belial also represents the struggle for salvation of individual human beings, who must live in the corrupt material world and choose between the baser pleasures of the material world ruled by Belial and the higher spiritual plane of existence beyond our world of illusions ruled by the ultimate divine being, whose various aspects include Yahweh the Creator, Christ the Savior, the feminine goddess Diana, etc. It’s difficult to view The Divine Invasion as a SF work, because it’s really an attempt to put PKD’s extremely complex and convoluted religious and philosophical beliefs into fictional form. And unlike the more auto biographical Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, this book takes a much broader and more allegorical approach to his still-evolving Gnostic ideas about suffering and evil in the material world, the dual nature of the divine, and the possibility of salvation through gnosis. If you are interested in these ideas, especially as they relate to PKD’s own religious experiences and life story, then you will be able to appreciate how many of his early stories questioning the morality and reality of our world evolved into his much more convoluted thinking after his religious experiences of 1974. And while he flirted with madness and schizophrenia in Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, he seems to have found a more coherent philosophical framework for his thoughts in The Divine Invasion. It is still a difficult book to understand, and may be very unsatisfying as a work of fiction, but it remains an essential read if you are a serious PKD student who wants to achieve ‘gnosis’ by diving down his rabbit hole. There are also several biographies of PDK that would shed more light on his life and ideas, and I will have to make time for them someday. These include Lawrence Sutin’s Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (2005) and Emmanuel Carrere’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (2005), and of course the rambling, obsessive notes of PKD himself, meticulously edited and boiled down by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem in 2001 as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. If you have read all these books, consider yourself a truly dedicated scholar of the most complex, troubled and fascinating personality to have ever been part of the SF genre. ...more |
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| 0679781374
| 9780679781370
| 0679781374
| 3.81
| 6,437
| 1985
| Apr 14, 1998
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really liked it
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Radio Free Albemuth: Divine messages via a pink laser from space Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Radio Free Albemuth was written in 1976 but onl Radio Free Albemuth: Divine messages via a pink laser from space Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Radio Free Albemuth was written in 1976 but only published posthumously in 1985. Even for Philip K Dick, this is a bizarre and partly deranged book. It’s a deeply personal autobiographical attempt for him to make sense of a series of bizarre religious experiences he collectively referred to as “2-3-74”. So if you are only a casual fan of PKD’s books or movies, this is probably not for you. However, if you love his novels and know something of his troubled life, it will provide an absolutely fascinating picture of a man struggling to extract meaning from it all, using every resource his powerful, wide-ranging and increasingly unstable mind can muster. It may be a confounding mess for many, but what a gloriously courageous attempt he makes. For me this book and his later complete rewrite VALIS (1981) provide a window into PKD’s mind that no other books can (other than the massive and unreadable Exegesis of Philip K Dick), and is a moving and profound experience if you go along with it. The story starts out quite simply. Part one is narrated by none other than Philip K Dick, a struggling science fiction writer and friend of Nicholas Brady, a Berkeley dropout who works at local record store. It is the late 1960s, and the book humorously depicts the growing counter-culture in Berkeley, with its legions of anti-establishment intellectuals roaming the streets and coffee houses on Telegraph Ave. It turns out that this is an alternate history United States where despotic right-winger Ferris F. Freemont has become President after Lyndon B. Johnson (think a sinister amalgam of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy). He is determined to crush liberals, free speech, and communist conspiracies. There is also a citizens militia of sorts called “Friends of the American People”, which serve to investigate anti-government groups including a (perhaps fictitious) organization called Aramchek dedicated to overthrowing Fremont’s government. Nick’s career at the record store is going nowhere, though he has an encyclopedic knowledge of music. He begins to receive strange visions that he believes are signals from VALIS, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. These signals come to him at 3am at night, delivered by a near-earth satellite firing a focused pink laser beam (I’m not joking here) straight to his brain. At first he is not sure what is happening, but gradually he understands that VALIS is a super rational alien collective mind that has chosen him (and a select few others) for a mission to overthrow the fascist dictatorship of President Freemont. This revelation is of course quite disturbing to his wife Rachel, but when VALIS warns him that his infant son Christopher has an inguinal hernia, something that did not show up in any medical exams, they rush him to the hospital and the doctors are shocked to discover his diagnosis was right, and do an emergency surgery to save his son (this actually happened to PKD in real life apparently). This causes their belief in VALIS to grow. Eventually VALIS grants visions to Nick that he should move to LA and become a record producer for folk musicians. He moves his family to LA and very quickly finds success in his new job. VALIS then reveals that this is all part of his mission to embed secret anti-Fremont subliminal messages in the songs he produces, in order to overthrow the totalitarian regime and bring freedom to the masses, who do not realize they are trapped in the Black Iron Prison that is representative of the evil Roman Empire that persecuted early Christians and has never ended. We also learn that VALIS has made previous attempts to heal the world of its madness, including various early Christian Gnostics, Elijah from the Old Testament, Jesus, etc. However, the Empire has continued to prevail, but VALIS has not given up the struggle. PDK provides dozens of pages explaining the philosophy of VALIS and all the obscure historical clues as to why the world is ailing. He dives way down the rabbit hole into cosmogony and cosmology, explaining how the creator of the universe is irrational and separate from the Logos, or rational mind, that is the ultimate source of wisdom. VALIS has sent homoplasmates to bond with certain chosen humans and impart this secret wisdom. HAVE I LOST YOU YET? ONLY PKD COULD COME UP WITH THIS STUFF, AND HE ACTUALLLY BELIEVES IT TOO. One day Nick has a vision of a folk singer named Sylvia, and soon after this she shows up at his office, asking for a clerical job. He hires her but convinces her she should be a songwriter instead, and they reveal to each other that they have been having similar dreams from VALIS. Having finally discovered a kindred spirit (which turns out to be part of the Aramchek movement), they seek to put VALIS’s plan into action, recording a hit song with the message “Join the party”, a subliminal appeal to revolution. His relationship with his wife is strained by his friendship with Sylvia (whose real last name turns out to be Aramchek). However, his good buddy Philip K Dick stays true to him despite being skeptical of this craziness. For some reason a lot of this weird 1960s conspiracy stuff and obscure underground societies reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Nick and Sylvia think they have successfully produced the song that will launch their revolution, but the FAPers (Friends of the American People) have actually been spying on them the entire time, and seize both of them along with PKD and throw them into a secret confinement facility outside the justice system. The FAPers reveal that they know about the plot, and that it has been foiled. There are some final events I won’t spoil, but suffice to say that the real PKD was clearly VERY PARANOID about the Republican Party, the FBI and CIA, and right-wingers in general. As everyone knows, they really are out to get us all. Whether or not you buy into any of PKDs paranoid fantasies or strange religious experiences, it’s undeniable that he wrote this book with searing honesty, pathos for the struggles of his characters (himself, really), and out of a genuine desire to understand what exactly was happening to him with all these visions and hallucinations. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book and its successor VALIS is that PKD separates himself into two characters, Nicholas Brady and PKD in Radio Free Albemuth, and Horselover Fat and PKD in VALIS. This essentially allows him to have an extended dialog with himself, as the Nick and Horselover characters undergo the strange visions and hallucinations, while the PKD characters are separate from this and serve as devil’s advocate. I’ve never seen a clearer fictional depiction of schizophrenia, but the fact that PKD could control the process and explore his own mental breakdown in a fictional narrative is simply incredible and to me was quite moving, particularly in VALIS. You can feel his struggles with sanity, even if you don’t believe in his gonzo religious philosophy. It’s a unique literary experience for any hardcore PKD fan, though it may make no sense whatsoever to most readers. Film Version (2010): I was surprised to discover a film version of Radio Free Albemuth had been made as a low budget indie production back in 2010 starring Jonanath Scarfe as Nicholas Brady, Katheryn Winnick as his wife Rachel, Shea Whigham as Philip K Dick, and Alanis Morisette as Slyvia Aramchek. With great trepidation but irresistible curiosity I watched it on Netflix. Basically all the dream sequences are laughably bad, and the actors struggle to deliver all of PKD’s bizarre dialog with straight faces, but that is really due to the source material itself. Frankly, I don’t think this book was ever meant to be filmed, and is almost impossible to make convincing. So I don’t blame the filmmakers, but I think this would be impossible to watch except for die-hard PKD fans like myself who’ve read the book already. It seems the producers also have the rights to VALIS as well, but I sincerely hope they don’t try that one. It makes Radio Free Albemuth seem downright conventional. I do give kudos to Shea Whigham for portraying PKD as a smart and somewhat cynical SF writer, but the real PKD was actually a combination of both Nick Brady and SF writer PKD, which makes for a much more complicated and unstable personality. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 2015
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Nov 04, 2015
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Nov 10, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0060095261
| 9780060095260
| 0060095261
| 3.94
| 3,924
| Jan 01, 2001
| May 28, 2002
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really liked it
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Minority Report and Other Stories: 4 PKD stories that inspired movies Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Philip K. Dick is the classic case of a br Minority Report and Other Stories: 4 PKD stories that inspired movies Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Philip K. Dick is the classic case of a brilliant but struggling artist who only got full recognition after he passed away. Despite publishing an incredible 44 novels and 121 stories during his lifetime, it was not until the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner was released in 1982 that PKD gained more mainstream attention, and sadly he died before being able to see the final theatrical release. A number of his short stories were adapted into feature-length films, and this audibook contains “The Minority Report” (1956), which inspired the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Minority Report starring Tom Cruise, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (1966), which was the loose basis for the 1990 Paul Verhoeven film Total Recall and a 2012 reboot starring Colin Farrell, “Paycheck” (1953), which John Woo directed in 2003 and starred Ben Affleck, and “Second Variety” (1953), which was adapted in 1995 as Screamers, starring Peter Weller. This audiobook also includes an ultra-short whimsical SF story called “The Eyes Have It” (1953) that has no reason for being here. Instead, it should have included the short story “Adjustment Team” (1954), which was made into the entertaining 2011 film The Adjustment Bureau starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. That film had a lot of nice character development, and strong romantic chemistry between the two leads. The audiobook narrator is Keir Dullea, a name that didn’t ring a bell but turns out to be none other than David Bowman from the iconic Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He does a good job with PDK’s material. There’s no question in my mind that Minority Report and Total Recall are the most successful films that have been adapted from Philip K. Dick short stories (the other strong films came from his novels: Blade Runner was adapted from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly was adapted from his novel A Scanner Darkly). But honestly, it’s quite a stretch to say that a 20-30 page short story can really form the basis for a feature film. That’s why marketing teams use the terms “inspired by” and “loosely-based on” to distance the films from their source material. That often stems complaints by the author or fans when filmmakers produce a real stinker, which happens all too often. So the first thing you’ll notice is that these short stories are dramatically different from their film versions. Of course they are. Normally you have a 200-300 page novel that a writer will adapt for the screen, usually going through dozens of versions throughout the filmmaking process. And frequently the job of a skilled screenwriter is knowing what aspects and characters to cut from the story that still preserves the core narrative of the original, while also allowing room for the visual aspects of film to be emphasized over some of the background details of the story. But if you are trying to make a 20-page story into a 90-minute film, you need to do the opposite, adding whole new characters or storylines to make a complete story. So it wouldn’t be fair to judge the film adaptations based on the story that provided it inspiration. And that’s why I will look at the short stories in this collection and their film adaptations as separate creations below. "The Minority Report"(1956) short story — I think this is one of the most intricate and thought-provoking stories that PKD ever wrote. John Anderton, the head of the Precrime unit, is a believer in the criminal justice system, which has reduced crime by almost 100% by using the predictions of three ‘precogs,’ whose visions of possible futures allow the police to apprehend suspects before they commit crimes. It seems to be a perfect system, until one day Anderton receives the ‘precog’ report that he will kill a man named Leo Kaplan that he has never heard of. To prove his innocence, he goes on the run and his assistant Ed Witner takes over and seeks to bring him to justice. The excitement of the story lies in Anderton hunting down the ‘minority report,’ which is a dissenting report when not all three ‘precogs’ see the same future event. While on the run, Anderton approaches his wife for support, is confronted by Leo Kaplan, learns what motivation he might have for killing Kaplan, realizes that Witner and he are not necessarily enemies, and has time to question whether the ‘precog’ crime prevention is really a ‘just’ system, whether it negates human free will, and whether right and wrong can exist if people are prevented from making their own choices. The story has all the classic PKD themes of paranoia, betrayal, and moral conundrums. The resolution of the story involves three separate ‘minority reports,’ each intricately connected to the other, and Anderton’s decision and its consequences are very different from the Spielberg film version. Minority Report(2002) film — This Steven Spielberg film is very successful because it takes the ideas of the story and then builds a complete future society around them. The film makes significant changes to the story details, but preserves the core moral questions that PDK raised. The visual details are very striking, with washed-out blacks and whites that give it a unique look. The biggest changes are to Anderton’s wife, the greater involvement of one of the precogs in providing Anderton help in clearing his name, and a completely new subplot involving Witner, Anderton’s boss Lamar Burgess, and a murder from the past that has been carefully covered up. The resolution of the film version is much more Hollywood than the story, since there is never any question that Anderton is a good person seeking justice who is wrongly accused. Questions about the justification of the precog system are not as prominent, and the moral dilemmas of Anderson’s final decision in the story are missing. But as a thought-provoking and pulse-pounding SF thriller, it’s a pretty impressive achievement. “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”(1966) short story — This story is only 22 pages long, and is a far cry from the big-budget, special effects-laden and hyper-violent Schwartzenegger extravaganza from Paul Verhoeven. Basically, the story version covers just the opening third of the film, before Arnold gets to Mars. Douglas Quail is a typical nobody who dreams of going to Mars. He decides to visit Rekal Incorporated, which implants false memories that feel real, and requests one in which he is a secret government agent. But when the Rekal staff begin the procedure, they discover that he already has real memories of being a secret agent on Mars, but they have been erased from his conscious mind. They decide the best recourse is to leave his memories alone and send him on his way. However, his real memories are surfacing and suddenly he is confronted by two police officers intent on killing him for knowing too much. Unlike in the film, the Rekal staff are not killed in painful and graphic ways, Quail’s wife is not a sexy but treacherous Sharon Stone, and there is no action-packed chase as he tries to escape his enemies. Instead, Quail cuts a deal with his pursuers that he will agree to have his memories erased if they promise to leave him alone. But when he returns to Rekal for the procedure, they discover an even deeper embedded memory that reveals exactly how important Quail is to the safety of Earth. It’s a pretty far-fetched development, but keep in mind this is a 22-page story and PDK never anticipated that it would be expanded into a blockbuster SF action film starring a Austrian former bodybuilder who would later become governor of California. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction! Total Recall (1990) film — What’s left to say about this film? It’s directed by one of my favorite directors, who made one of the best futuristic cop films of all time, 1987’s Robocop, as well as 1997’s satirical take on Robert A. Heinlein’s classic military SF novel Starship Troopers (1959). Total Recall was one of Verhoeven’s greatest moments, pairing Arnold Schwartzenegger at the peak of his acting powers (I can’t believe I just typed that) with a propulsive, action-packed, ultra-violent romp through a future Earth and Mars. Its satirical and black humor were augmented by the complex plot involving real and false memories, so it could be enjoyed on a basic visceral level as well as a more cerebral one. I’d have to say that Total Recall is one of my favorite SF action films, but it is so different from the story that it wouldn’t be fair to compare them. “Paycheck” (1953) short story — This is another PDK short story about erased memories, a hero on the run trying to unravel the meaning behind a series of mysterious objects, surrounded by people who may be allies or enemies. In that sense, it shares many elements with the above two stories. It’s about an engineer named Jennings who accepts a secret contract with Rethrick Construction, under the condition that he will be given a fat paycheck in two years time, but will have his memories erased of his confidential work. However, when he wakes up, his paycheck is not the big wad of cash he expected, but a bunch of seemingly-useless trinkets. The story revolves around Jennings using each of the trinkets one by one to get him out of various scrapes, all leading to a showdown with the owner of Rethrick Corporation. I won’t reveal the details of who gave him the trinkets and why, but it does involve many of PKD’s favorite themes. And while the story is well constructed, I thought it was a bit too predictable once the basic conceit was revealed. In addition, the resolution of the story wasn’t particularly impressive. Considering how many stories PDK has written, I’m not really sure why this was deemed film-worthy. Paycheck (2002) film — This was not a good SF film, unfortunately. More than anything, casting Ben Affleck as a whip-smart engineer who prepares an intricate series of clues based on knowledge of future events is just painful to watch. Affleck’s acting skills are abysmal (I think his directorial skills are infinitely better, based on Gone Baby Gone and Argo). Here his leading-man charisma was non-existent, and his chemistry with Uma Thurman was sometimes embarrassingly off. The other problem was handing this vehicle to John Woo, a HK director best known for super-high body count action flicks starring Chow Yun Fat. He’s made the transition to Hollywood, but only to make kinetic but ham-handed films like Face Off, Hard Target, Broken Arrow, and Mission Impossible II. So basically the film takes the basic plot elements of the story for the first 30 minutes, and then adds 90 minutes of mindless and fairly boring chase scenes and mayhem. Strangely enough, even the action scenes are quite tame when you think about the brutality of The Killer or Hard Boiled. Overall, this was a very forgettable film and shouldn’t really be associated with PKD. “Second Variety” (1953) short story — This is one of PKD’s best, a surprisingly tense and chilling story about a future nuclear war which has reduced civilization to rubble, but the war continues thanks to “claws,” which are self-replicating robots that attack any human being and slice them to bits with whirring blades. They were made by the US against the Russians, but they have apparently begun to made newer versions of themselves to be more effective killing machines, including humanoid forms. The entire time I listened to this I was reminded of James Cameron’s TERMINATOR films, since the ‘claws’ ruthlessly try to infiltrate the remnants of humanity hidden in bunkers, and wreak havoc when they get in. The story focuses on several characters who are trying to identify the unknown “second variety” of humanoid robots, and we can see all the classic paranoia over who is human and who is robot, which would later be explored in greater depth in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner. Screamers (1995) film — I didn’t know this film existed until I read up on “Second Variety,” and it looks like a low-budget, direct-to-video type flick released in 1995. The film stars Peter Weller, but it gets only 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, and having watched the trailer, it looks really, really bad, a typical SF B-movie with grainy cinematography, whirring blades, screaming soldiers, and cheesy music. I just can’t make myself watch this. ...more |
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Nov 05, 2015
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Nov 02, 2015
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Audiobook
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| 3.67
| 9,486
| Apr 1974
| 1985
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really liked it
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Concrete Island: Stranded in modernity like a latter-day Crusoe Originally posted at Fantasy Literature In the early 1970s, J.G. Ballard was busily crea Concrete Island: Stranded in modernity like a latter-day Crusoe Originally posted at Fantasy Literature In the early 1970s, J.G. Ballard was busily creating modern fables of mankind’s increasingly urban environment and the alienating effect on the human psyche. Far from humans yearning to return to their agrarian and hunter-gatherer roots, Ballard posited that modern man would begin to adapt to his newly-created environment, but at what price? Ballard’s protagonists in Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975) are modern, urbane creatures, educated and detached, who embrace their technology-centric urban lifestyles. But when conditions change, their primitive urges and psychopathologies emerge to horrifying effect. In Concrete Island, a modern-day retelling of Robinson Crusoe, Ballard introduces the most unlikely set-piece for a modern novel, an overlooked patch in our overdeveloped cities, a triangular overgrown traffic island bordered by two expressways. This is the opening passage of the book: Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London. Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre. The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland’s skull. During the few seconds before his crash he clutched at the whiplashing spokes of the steering wheel, dazed by the impact of the chromium window pillar against his head. The car veered from side to side across the empty traffic lanes, jerking his hands like a puppet’s. The shredding tyre laid a black diagonal stroke across the white marker lines that followed the long curve of the motorway embankment. Out of control, the car burst through the palisade of pinewood trestles that formed a temporary barrier along the edge of the road. Leaving the hard shoulder, the car plunged down the grass slope of the embankment. Thirty yards ahead, it came to a halt against the rusting chassis of an overturned taxi. Barely injured by this violent tangent that had grazed his life, Robert Maitland lay across his steering wheel, his jacket and trousers studded with windshield fragments like a suit of lights. Our protagonist Maitland finds himself injured and dazed, unable to climb up the steep embankments but also invisible from the drivers on the expressways. He tries to get drivers’ attention as they drive to and from home to work on the weekdays, and then as they drive off to picnics and other leisure activities on the weekend. As the days go by, he tries various ways to escape his situation, but fails to do so. He uses his store of wine from the trunk of his Jaguar to dull his pain and hunger, and finally resorts to setting his vehicle on fire to get attention. This does succeed in getting the attention not of passerby but instead two marginal individuals who have broken off from society: Jane, a young woman fleeing an unhappy marriage, and Proctor, a simpleton who was formerly an acrobat in a traveling circus. Proctor is strong but subservient to Jane, and she lives a strange decadent existence, turning tricks with passing motorists and smoking marijuana in an abandoned theatre. When Maitland first encounters the two, they control the situation but extend aid to him. As he recuperates, his initial urgency to get back to his easy but empty existence with his wife, child, and mistress lessens, as he starts to find a strange comfort in leaving behind all the everyday stresses of modern life. He develops a sexual relationship with Jane, who insists on being paid five pounds to ensure there are no emotional ties whatsoever. Maitland seeks to enlist the aid of Proctor, but it is only when he exerts force over both Jane and Proctor that they grant him grudging respect. He then exploits Proctor by performing an unspeakable act of humiliation, as the vestiges of civilized behavior seem to melt away from him. The ending is inconclusive and leaves us with no clear-cut moral to ease our discomfort. The story of Concrete Island is very simple indeed, almost a stage play with three principle actors, except that the most important character is the setting itself, the forlorn and ignored patch of discarded objects and marginal people which make up this island. The character of Maitland is far from a heroic protagonist, as his behavior becomes increasingly instinctual and selfish. And yet there is a strange appeal to their lives, forgotten by the modern world surrounding them. The ambiguity with which Ballard infuses his modern urban landscapes is his most powerful technique, as he explores the ‘inner space’ of his characters in his modern fables. If our obsession with modernity has desensitized us to our environment, can we really return to an earlier existence closer to nature? Or will we embrace technology and modern comforts, even at the expense of our emotional lives? It’s a valid question to raise, and certainly one that remains unanswered, even 40 years after the first publication of this strange and disturbing tale. ...more |
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| 0811200124
| 9780811200127
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| 076532136X
| 9780765321367
| 076532136X
| 4.25
| 699
| Mar 2009
| Apr 13, 2010
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liked it
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The Best of Gene Wolfe: Challenging, allusive, and tricky stories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I decided to tackle this collection for a thir The Best of Gene Wolfe: Challenging, allusive, and tricky stories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature I decided to tackle this collection for a third time, this time armed with Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986, an 826-page analysis covering Wolfe’s output through 1986, including most of his short stories (no matter how obscure) along with The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, Free Live Free, and The Book of the New Sun. It is truly a work of dedication, a painstaking analysis of symbols, names, literary references, and themes of each story, and yet clearly the work of a fan rather than a dry scholarly study. Gene Wolfe is frequently described as one of the most brilliant SF writers in the genre by critics, authors, and readers alike. Some fans praise his books above all others, and there is a WolfeWiki page dedicated to discussing his work. This makes it very difficult to raise a note of dissent without feeling like the only one who doesn’t get it. But there are certainly many SFF readers that are baffled and frustrated by his stories, because they are packed with metaphors, literary references, hidden themes, and require extremely close reading to understand and appreciate. One recurring response I get when I complain I didn’t understand Wolfe is that you won’t understand a Wolfe story until the second reading or more. That struck me as strange – why should a reader have to read something twice to get it? It sounds like work rather than pleasure. And I think this is what separates Wolfe fans from others. If you take pleasure in closely examining a puzzle or riddle, are always on the lookout for a possible reference, hidden meaning in a character’s name, or a key story element hidden in a seemingly casual offhand comment, then his stories can be an addictive puzzle. Judging from the number of awards he’s won and his dedicated fan base, there is certainly a contingent who find the effort worthwhile, but I think it’s fair to say his work is an acquired taste. Many will find that it isn’t worth it, or lacks the enjoyment of their favorite writers. Last year I finally read one of his earliest books, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), which consisted of three loosely-connected novellas narrated by some very unreliable characters gradually revealing a series of puzzles and mysteries for the reader to unlock. It was very challenging work, but intriguing enough to make the effort worthwhile. Please see my review for details. So next I decided to try this collection of his best short stories, selected by the author himself. It’s a hefty tome with 31 stories spanning 478 pages. It includes a number of award winners, which I probably should have focused on, but I went ahead and started at the beginning. And discovered that Gene Wolfe’s short stories are more often than not inscrutable, impenetrable, and frustrating. First off, his favorite story element is unreliable narrators, who frequently do not identify themselves, and often has a piecemeal memory of events that they relay out of sequence. Wolfe loves to toy with the reader, sprinkling little breadcrumbs amidst an otherwise mundane surface story that we are supposed to pick up, digest, think deeply upon, and finally figure out what the author was carefully hiding in a second reading. Is this his idea of fun? For whom, I might inquire? I understand the idea of not spoon-feeding the reader by spelling out exactly what a story is about, and avoiding a heavy-handed message at the end. Really, I get that. But I was literally at a loss at the end of most of the stories in this collection, since Wolfe simply cuts off the ending without any clear explanation whatsoever. So I initially gave up on this collection one-third of the way through, then decided to give it another chance and only made it to the midway point with no better luck. I decided to cut my losses and move on to other books that provided more immediate rewards. Eight months later when the 2016 Hugo Awards were announced, I noticed that Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 was the runner-up in the Best Related Work category (losing out to No Award, unfortunately, but that is another story). I recalled that someone by that name had posted a number of very helpful and insightful comments on my initial, frustrated review of this collection. Indeed they are the same person. And so here I am, making a third attempt to scale Mount Wolfe, armed with some serious firepower. Here are reviews of the most notable stories, assisted by the analysis of a truly dedicated Wolfe scholar and fan. My technique was to read the Wolfe story first, read Aramini’s analysis of it, and then if it felt worth it read the story again. This often revealed a great deal of insight as I picked up on many of the clues and allusions buried in the text, previously unrecognized. He also has a series of YouTube videos explaining Wolfe’s major works. Here is the first one with a general overview: Marc Aramini on Gene Wolfe and Literature, Part 1. If you think you might be interested in this book, perhaps you can listen to some of his YouTube videos first to get an idea of his erudition and enthusiasm. But since the greatest pleasure is solving the puzzles central to each story, they will not be revealed here. “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” (1970) This is the story of Tackman Babcock, a lonely young boy who must entertain himself in the beach house operated by his mother near the sea. He is mostly neglected by his mother, aunts, and his mother’s male companions Jason and Dr. Black. So he spends much of his time reading a book given to him by Jason (shop-lifted, actually). In the book, Captain Ransom is the hero and ends on Doctor Death’s Island. Doctor Death experiments on animals, turning them into monstrous half-men. This is a clear tribute to H.G. Wells’ classic The Island of Dr. Moreau, but there are many more layers to this story. The characters from the book begin to weave themselves into Tackman’s daily life, addressing him and having conversations. Soon the distinctions between his imagination and reality blur, and when strange events begin to occur in the house, we begin to see the meta-narrative come into focus. Wolfe is playing with the structure of narrative and the power of imagination, while also exploring the lonely world of an unwanted boy and the callous adults that surround him. “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” (1972) We are introduced to the twin worlds of Saint Croix and Saint Anne, which were originally colonized by French settlers but were overtaken by later waves of colonists from Earth. There are stories that Saint Anne had an original race of aboriginals that were wiped out by the French colonists, but details are strangely vague. In fact, some claim that the initial race were shapeshifters, suggesting they may still remain, hidden in plain sight. Our protagonist is a boy growing up in a mysterious villa with his brother David, raised under the watchful tutelage of Mr. Million, a robot guardian who educates them. The boy and his brother initially are not cognizant of their father’s business, a high-end brothel, knowing only that there is a steady stream of wealthy visitors that come to their property to be entertained. Their father is a distant and somewhat menacing presence who shows little interest in them until one day he invites them to his laboratory. He begins to give them a series of tests, more like experiments, which involve drugs, psychological tests, and leave them both drained and uncertain of their memories afterward. This continues for some time. The boys eventually encounter a young girl who becomes their companion, get into some petty criminal activities together, and finally the boy is taken further into his father’s confidences. The details that are revealed cast the entire story into a different light, and the story takes a stranger turn as a mysterious anthropologist from Earth named John V. Marsh shows up, asking to speak with the author of the Veil Hypothesis, which suggests that the native aboriginals were never wiped out, but instead… “The Death of Dr. Island” (1973) This story won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1973, and had its genesis as a sort of jest when Isaac Asimov mistakenly announced that “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” had won the Nebula Award, when “No Award” had the most votes. So Wolfe decided to write an inversion of that story, playing with the title and themes as he is wont to do, and producing one of his most impressive stories. The setting is very unique and important. A young boy named Nicholas emerges from a hatch in an island environment, naked and alone, surrounded by trees, ocean, and wind. Initially he explores silently, before the surrounding objects, both animate and inanimate, address him as Dr. Island. He then encounters an older youth named Ignatio, who attacks him without warning when he asks for some fish to eat. Finally he runs into Diane, who is not violent but also seems mentally disturbed. Dr. Island reveals that the island environment is artificially made and intended as a place to provide therapy for them so they can rejoin normal society eventually. Nicholas is sociopathic and has undergone radical brain surgery to cure his behavior, and Ignatio is homicidal. Diane herself has catatonic episodes. But Dr. Island is not forthcoming with some very crucial details, and the “Death of Dr. Island” is a very multi-layered play on words that will only be revealed at the end. The story of course has overt Christian imagery, namely the Garden of Eden in which our three characters are thrust into, naked and ignorant, and there are even serpents and fruits involved, along with the disembodies voice of Dr. Island who monitors this world. And yet it is far more than a simplistic metaphor for the loss of innocence – Wolfe subverts the analogy at every turn, in ways so subtle that multiple readings are needed to discover the little clues and recurring imagery that point to the natural world and contrast it with the artificial purposes of this future society and its treatment of the mentally disturbed. It is an intensely moralistic but sophisticated story, and for once I could appreciate the emotional lives of the characters, which are often distant in Wolfe stories. Definitely a highlight of the collection. “Forlesen” (1974) This may be one of the most inscrutable and bizarre stories of the collection, and that is saying something. I honestly didn’t like it when I first finished it, but after reading Aramini’s analysis, I could better appreciate what he was doing, even if I would never have recognized most of the references he embedded in the story. Emmanuel Forlesen wakes up one morning, with no knowledge of anything, even his own name. He encounters a woman making breakfast, who turns out to be his wife, and she urges him to “read the orientation manual”. It feels a lot like The Truman Show or a PKD story at that moment. The manual welcomes him to planet Planet, and tells him everything is normal and not to be concerned, also indicating that any memories he has of the past are false, and urging him to not be late for work. On his drive to work at Model Pattern Products he has two strange encounters, the first with a policeman who pulls him over when he pauses to look over the side of the elevated road, threatening him with a gun to get going. This bit strangely reminded me of a Cordwainer Smith story named “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”, though mostly just for the surreal nature of the highway itself. His second encounter is with a strange old hitchhiker named Abraham Beale, who has lost his job and his farm. Abraham has done many jobs in the past, but it seems that modern society no longer has need of him. Forlesen drops off Abraham at a dog food factory and heads to the office. The extended office sequence marks the bulk of the story, in which Forlesen meets a series of supervisors, secretaries, and working groups. The supervisors make inane sports metaphors about teamwork and results, the secretaries complain of problem employees. Forlesen is asked to join the Creativity Group meeting, which seems utterly pointless and futile, and then Leadership Problem Quiz, which seems equally meaningless. Events get more and more surreal, with dozens of tiny details that suggest possible hidden meanings but without obvious references. Finally at the end Forlesen meets the Examiner, who asks him, “What’ll it be? Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, National Hero, aged lore master, or novelist?" Forlesen replies “I want to know if it’s meant anything…if what I’ve suffered – if it’s been worth it.” To which the Examiner’s answer is “No…Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.” It’s cryptic, but clearly Wolfe is ridiculing the modern corporate life and contrasting it with the lost working-class professions of the past represented by Abraham. It’s very much like The Office but not the slightest bit funny, just leaving a bad taste of futility and confusion, which is what I assume Wolfe was after. Aramini manages to find a wealth of insight from all the cryptic clues of the story, but the overall message is loud and clear even if the details remain a mystery. “The Hero as Werwolf” (1975) This story is much more accessible than Forlesen, though clearly important themes are hidden below the surface. It is about a young man named Paul, who is hunting food in a European city in the indeterminate future. As the story progresses, we learn that he is hunting the Masters of the city as food, while he considers himself human and separate from them. In the midst of the hunt, he runs into an old man and young girl who have selected the same wealthy couple as targets, and initially the dispute over who has prior claims. Paul is intrigued with the thought of another human girl, as they are very rare and humans live a furtive and fugitive existence in the Masters’ city. He tracks down the old man and daughter and tries to negotiate to gain possession of the girl as a mate, for lack of a better word. The father resists, insisting he cannot care for the girl, who is mute and feral. But Paul insists, and they become hunting partners. When their target, a little boy, flees into a building, Paul and the girl rush in to pursue him, and just when they have captured the boy, and accident causes Paul’s leg to get caught in a door. The girl takes the only action she can think of to free him…and the story abruptly ends. I remember looking up and thinking, “WTF?” It’s a common feeling after finishing a Wolfe story. After reading Aramini’s careful analysis and re-reading it I understood a lot more, but it’s certainly a tricky one. At least it can be enjoyed as a tense narrative with interesting world-building. But that ending… “The Eyeflash Miracles” (1976) This story completely defeated me in my second attempt to read this collection. It has all the elements that excite Wolfe fans who want to delve into the huge number of religious allusions to the Wizard of Oz, birth of Christ, and Krishna as an incarnation of Vishnu, as it depicts the empty mechanistic hell of a secular and technology-dominated world where the marginalized members of society are cast aside. If you are not familiar with the above elements, the story of young blind Little Tib, Nitty, Mr. Parker, and Pravithi are almost incomprehensible. So I think this perfectly encapsulates what can drive a normal reader completely mad with frustration – the surface events seem unconnected, insignificant, and confusing, but for those readers cognizant of the undercurrents, themes, and religious symbolism, it is a rich and complex fable of a young man who may be Christ and Krishna, performing miracles in a fallen world as fantasy and reality converge, till they link hands and skip down the yellow brick road into the sunset at the end. Without Marc Aramini’s insight, I would never have gotten through this one. “Seven American Nights” (1978) This is one of the most fascinating and tantalizing stories of the collection and was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella. It is the story of Nadan Jafferzadah, a wealthy Iranian adventurer and arts/cultural tourist who journeys across the Atlantic to visit a future America devastated by chemical weapons. The story’s title is an obvious play on the Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights) collection of Middle Eastern and other folk tales that date back to the 8th century and earlier with their origins mainly in India and Persia. They coincide with the Islamic Golden Age of the 8th to 13th centuries, so they story’s setting is an ironic turning of the tables, with America in decline and Europe back in ascendancy. Nadan writes the story in the form of a travel diary, with entries for each day, as he explores a Silent City dominated by ancient decaying ruins of a great civilization. We soon learn that this city is an ancient center of government, but the people living there are much diminished from their former greatness, as many are deformed by genetic defects caused by the chemical weapons war that wrecked the US. He makes many observations expressing his pity for the sad state of affairs, but respect for the old architecture, art, and accomplishments of this once-great nation. He is eager to try American foods, theatre, and the local women as well. He takes a particular interest in a nearby theatre playing Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet and J.M. Barrie’s Mary Rose, who is more famous for Peter Pan. He attends regularly and becomes romantically involved with the lead actress Ardis and her leading man Bobby. He also tours the city and has various encounters and glimpses of mysterious events whose importance are not immediately clear. The details of the story are incredibly intricate. Most things seem innocuous coincidences, but as we realize that his journal entries may be concealing various details, and he experiments with some drug-infused marzipan eggs, it becomes increasingly difficult to accept what is being told. As events become more bizarre and sinister, it is unclear what is truth or hallucination. There are also various subtle clues that our narrator may not be the carefree tourist he claims to be. I read this story twice, once before reading the extensive analysis of Marc Armini and once afterward, and was astounded by the amount of minute scholarship and analysis that he and others in the URTH mailing list have devoted to understanding this story. It is open to myriad interpretations of its cryptic events, to the point that plausible cases can be made for completely different explanations. There are a plethora of literary allusions, and Aramini and others have tracked down a wealth of details and parallels to events and themes the story explores, along with the significance of various character names. However, it should be notes that the story holds up as a finely-wrought story with multiple layers of meaning, and a cryptic ending that forces you to rethink everything that has come before. It is a masterpiece on par with Wolfe’s other great novellas here, “Fifth Head of Cerberus” and “The Death of Dr. Island”. ...more |
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May 27, 2022
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May 25, 2022
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| 4.23
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it was amazing
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Dec 30, 2021
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Jan 01, 2022
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it was amazing
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Aug 09, 2021
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Aug 09, 2021
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really liked it
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Apr 20, 2018
not set
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Feb 19, 2018
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| 4.12
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it was amazing
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Mar 06, 2017
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Feb 24, 2017
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it was amazing
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Nov 16, 2017
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Jan 06, 2017
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Jan 06, 2017
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| 4.13
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Mar 11, 2017
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Dec 19, 2016
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Nov 06, 2016
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Oct 15, 2016
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Oct 15, 2016
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Oct 14, 2016
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| 4.41
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liked it
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Dec 22, 2016
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Nov 30, 2015
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| 4.25
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really liked it
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Feb 11, 2018
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Nov 30, 2015
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really liked it
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Nov 13, 2015
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Nov 20, 2015
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really liked it
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Nov 04, 2015
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Nov 10, 2015
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really liked it
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Nov 05, 2015
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Nov 02, 2015
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really liked it
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Oct 10, 2015
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Oct 07, 2015
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Oct 03, 2015
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Sep 28, 2016
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Oct 03, 2015
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